— Our Work
Chenja
Chenja is a digital product that is home to the illustrators of the world. Scroll through how we’re helping Chenja fulfill their ambition.
How Chenja is building a bustling worldwide community of illustrators
The opportunity
Ready to take Chenja up a level
Chenja is on a mission to connect the worlds community of illustrators so that artists can show their recognition to talented individuals and find inspiration. The driving force behind this movement is an illustrator himself, Stuart Bridgeman.
Stuart has been a Digital Creative for 10 years, working in web design, app design, games, illustration, animation, VFX, UI design, logo design and full company branding. Throughout his career, he found there lacked a sense of community online where illustrators can share their work and collaborate.
This sparked an idea to change the online community of illustrators for the better, uniting community creatives. This was the start of, Chenja.
Stuart, went on to design and build the MVP, outsourcing the technical development work. After Chenja’s first release, the platform started to gain users and quickly became a bustling community, validating Stuart’s idea. Now that there was a user base, and that interest was high, Stuart was ready to take Chenja to the next level.
Chenja
What happened
Building Chenja for the future and adding value
Within the hiyield team, our developers work with a range of languages. For Chenja, the product written in Python and Javascript. One of our Python experts was perfectly suited to help Stuart achieve his goals for Chenja.
Stuart had four key areas of development:
- Prepare Chenja to be a mobile application
- Improve the user experience
- Increase user engagement
- Create a ‘News’ section for the site
A complete front end re-write
Micheal reviewed the code and found that the front end would require a total rewrite because the original app was written in React.js with both class-based components and functional components. Although this doesn’t create a major issue, the application was harder to maintain.
We went on to rewrite the front end using the frameworks Vue.js and TailwindCSS.
Key technical elements:
- Language Python & Javascript
- Frameworks: Vue.js & Django
- CSS Framework: TailwindCSS
- Backend Technology: Redis InMemory
- Database & Celery Message Queue
- Database: PostgreSQL
Improving the User Experience
We worked collaboratively with Stuart on how best to improve the user experience, and together came up with:
- Modernise artwork galleries
- Improved user profiles
- Improved complement system
- New user commenting system
- New web notifications
Chenja was built using best practise responsive coding, therefore making it perfect to use on any device. We also utilised TailwindUI so that we could progress Chenja as much as we could within the time frame we had.
The artwork galleries had a fresh new design, and there was a simple function to search through the artwork via tags helping the user to find exactly what they want.
The profile section had a new layout with an improved navigation bar for easy use Directing a user to parts of a profile: about, artwork, achievements and compliments.
How Chenja will start to create revenue
With the growth of new users, and a new user experience ready to go live, Stuart was eager to develop a revenue strategy.
The most evident and easiest way to monetise Chenja is to build in a function for advertisements throughout the site.
We went on to implement this into the site for Stuart to then choose a platform such as Google ads, Carbon or other ad agencies to start earning money from views.
“It was our first major project where we fully utilised tailwindCSS and tailwindUI into a large project. Tailwind always provides, for me, an amazing developer experience, and is easy and quick to prototype yours and the client’s ideas allowing the development to become much more agile.”
Mike Roberts - Co-Founder & Senior Developer - hiyield
The compliments system is unique and instead of a Likes, a user receives stickers that re-fresh every week, giving a user the ability to show their appreciation to other users artwork. We created a new display and animated this function, creating an engaging slap and shudder effect, increasing user satisfaction.
The user commenting system also enabled a way for users to easily communicate to artists on a more granular level. We then went on to integrate the News section of the site, where the team at Chenja could create posts and keep users up-to-date with the latest happenings.
The result
Slick new user experience and the infrastructure for new areas of growth.
Chenja is the first of it’s kind and solving a gap in the market. Working with Stuart to accomplish his visions for Chenja was totally in sync with skills and experiences we had.
Stuart has evolved Chenja to a new world of valuable experiences for its users. Not only to just to make it look good, but to help the product be ready for what it has to come…
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